(Alan: The following letters-to-the-editor were mostly submitted to Durham, North Carolina's Independent Weekly.
October 26, 2000
Editor (The Independent),
I was encouraged by Hal Crowther's recent categorization of our political economy as a "plutocracy." ("Alone on the Cliff," October 18-24, 2000)
I also admire Hal's courageous dismissal of "conglomerates and their parasites --- like political parties and universities."
However, when Hal laments the loss of culture, compassion, compass and conscience as the devolved outcome of Darwinian economics, I wish he would venture an opinion as to why the brutality of advantage has overwhelmed all opposition.
The encompassing consumerism that Hal briefly mentions is rooted in the philosophical -- if not theological -- premise that the obsessive pursuit of self-interest will liberate the "invisible hand of the marketplace" so that everyone will be saved by the resulting "trickle down" --- a sort of modern manna mediated by magnates and the mandates of materialism.
The question -- "Are we here, primarily, to serve self or others?" -- has been answered by the solipsistic certainty that Self is primary.
Lao Tzu observed that "Nature is not human-hearted." Tragically, we have extrapolated the zoological truth of Darwinism to dethrone the heart of Human nature. We humans are no longer "set apart from the world," but are swallowed up by its bloody maw.
I realize that my judgment steps on many "progressive" toes. However, given the dog-eat-dog nature of social Darwinism, only a fool would refuse to use fang and claw to reach the top of the plutocratic pecking order.
Change requires admission of wrong-doing - not the modern world's strongest suit. Unfortunately, there is no alternative to social Darwinism but to acknowledge the uniqueness of human life, locating within it sacred qualities rooted in a repository of value which --- subsisting by unspeakable mystery --- exists beyond the observable workings of Nature. (In this regard, I'm encouraged by a developing consensus among scientists that "Reality" is made up of eleven dimensions. At a recent, national convention of physicists, a provocatively mysterious question was set forth as central to the next century's scientific agenda: "If there are, in fact, eleven dimensions, why do we only live in three of them?")
Slurping at the smorgasbord of Nouveau Choice, we experience no need to make binding decisions that would steer us upward from the primordial swamp.
Instead, we have abused broad-mindedness so that transcendental value is disparaged when not ridiculed. Meanwhile, the plutocratic drift of social Darwinism -- coupled with totalitarian materialism -- have been deified as the twin foundations of existence.
Inevitably, we re-make ourselves in the image of our gods.
Or, as William Blake put it: "We become what we perceive."
In the end, there is no escape from choices which are -- at least functionally -- of religious importance.
You pay your money. You take your chances.
Attentively,
Alan Archibald
***
Dear Editor (Newsweek),
I hold three university degrees, a high school teaching credential in Biological Science, and have taught at Managua, Nicaragua's National Medical School and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where I was contracted to write a Spanish language textbook ("La Charla").
In 1996, after teaching upper level high school Spanish in Hillsborough, North Carolina, for six years, the State Department of Public Instruction bluntly informed me that my "lateral entry teaching credential" would not be renewed unless I took 15 additional credit hours of Spanish language coursework. Ironically, I could have taught these courses as capably as the people from whom I was obliged to take them.
Rather than suffer this abuse, I quit.
If America's public schools "want teachers" -- Newsweek, October 2, 2000 -- it is important to lay responsibility for the shortage at their own doorstep.
It is difficult to describe the full scope of Public Instruction's metastatic foolishness. Still, one must start somewhere...
For example, it is absurd to require credentials of prospective teachers when these same candidates might be invited to demonstrate their capability (or lack thereof) in actual classroom settings. If "the proof is not in the pudding" then where does it reside? In a sheepskin?
Alternatively, the fruitless, state-mandated hazing whereby teachers secure their largely bogus credentials is rooted in the need to fleece a captive audience, thus insuring the financial survival of University Departments of Education, among the most counterproductive enterprises sponsored by The Ivory Tower.
Or consider the surfeit of administrative dead-wood. New York City's Public School District employs thirty (30) times as many administrators -- "per student" -- as NYC's Diocesan School District. These redundant, meddling ner-do-wells should get "real jobs." Every administrator returned to the classroom translates to 3 or 4 additional teachers hired with the savings.
It is true that the outsized scale of public instruction requires an unusually large number of "administrative wardens" to "keep the peace." However, non-stop skirmishes -- and occasional pitched battles -- impeach the putative tranquility which administrators claim to maintain. There's a cheek-by-jowl relationship here with Mayor Richard Dailey's Freudian slip following the Democratic Convention riots in 1968: "The police are not here to create disorder, they're here to preserve it."
Although I will vote - reluctantly - for Al Gore or Ralph Nader, sustained Republican support for school vouchers is right on target.
Recently, Newsweek columnist George Will quoted Lisa Graham Keegan (Arizona's Superintendent of Public Instruction): "Everyone is complicit in trying to make the education system look good without merit... This country is so content not to know the truth about its children, it's horrifying."
Help dismantle the conspiracy of silence.
Gratefully,
Alan Archibald
***
8/27/00
Editor (Newsweek),
In "Nader and the Push for Purity (8/28/00)," Anna Quindlen faults Ralph for an "either-or attitude that most of us had when very young (so that) his politics need never grow old."
I disagree.
America's two party, winner-take-all system is the template for "either-or" politics and creates the Peter Pan puerility Ms. Quindlen rightly laments. Stuck in this self-serving over-simplification, American democracy never matured, but slowly devolved into big money's "back forty."
There are many putative differences between Republicans and Democrats. However, when Al Gore insists categorically that we can have "growth" AND "ecological integrity," he's admitting philosophical kinship with the forces of consumerism that despoil the planet while pretending to put a populist face on plutocracy.
Ironically, it's Ralph Nader who breaks this "either-or" mould, advocating for multi-partisan, "parliamentarian" politics, staunchly refusing to sharecrop the droppings of big business. Quindlen construes this uncompromising view as childish.
Perhaps.
Perhaps an American politician has finally matured, finally decided to "make the children pick up after themselves."
I voted for Nader in the last presidential election, but am leaning toward Gore in 2000. My Democratic inclination isn't based on heartfelt conviction that Gore will resist the formidable pressures threatening representative democracy.
Rather, I consider Bush so dangerously empty-headed -- so appallingly self-preening that, throughout his term, "the looking glass" would reflect nothing but his "pretty face" and a wraith-like "invisible hand" whose foremost function is to throttle the planet's poor.
Attentively,
Alan Archibald
***
8/27/00
Editor (Independent),
Although Hal Crowther's new book, "Cathedrals of Kudzu," brims with wit and insight, his description of the relationship between "belief," "doubt" and "drink" -- misses the mark.
As a Catholic living in the South, Hal's assessment of Walker Percy seems somewhat misrepresentative, both of Walker, and of Catholicism.
Catholics do not consider themselves "saved," although it is a rubric of our faith that "the far shore" will embrace those who have acted in harmony with the incarnation of love.
Surely, the Church hasn't surrounded Percy with "the odor of sanctity:" rather, Catholics esteem Walker as one of our more fruitful sinners.
Nor is Percy as assailed by doubt as Hal would have it. Many incidental pieces in "Lost in the Cosmos" are egregiously orthodox --- religiously self-certain to an almost embarassing degree. Consider Percy's letter to the New York Times equating abortion-on-demand with the same sort of slippery slope logic used by Nazi social engineers in the 1930s. (Although Percy's argument is carefully crafted, the New York Times didn't even acknowledge its submission: apparently "the tone" was insufficiently avant garde to satisfy the Editors' penchant for that specifically modern oxymoron --- "broad-minded censorship.")
It's not my purpose to attack or defend the content of Percy's writing. Rather, I fault Hal's observation that "no first rate fiction was ever written by anyone who was too certain about anything." By this rubric, the collected writings of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky are summarily dismissed, not to mention Southern greats like Flannery O'Connor and Percy himself. I wonder how Hal accommodates the Bible, an anthology of texts, which -- while partially historical -- embody mytho-fictive writing at its best.
Admittedly, doubt is essential to tested belief, as Job bore eloquent witness. In this century, G. K. Chesterton -- the British Catholic and self-assured believer whom Hal himself holds in high regard believed that Christ crucified was lacerated by doubt concerning the existence of God.
I do not dispute Hal's determination to focus on Percy's fondness for bourbon, as no one disputes Chesterton's fondness for beer and wine.
As distinct from tee-totaling sects, Catholics drink.
Italy, France, Spain, Portugal, the Czech Republic and Ireland - as well as the Catholic regions of Germany, Holland and Belgium - are the planetary cultures where drinking is most carefully woven into the tapestry of everyday life.
Oddly, Hal has difficulty recognizing this cultural fundament of earthy - at times, mucky - Catholicity, and in reaction, seems unduly determined to accord moonshine a sanctuary of its own, a place where unbelievers can participate in the true secular sacrament.
However, the well-documented relationship between writers and drink, while productive, has not - in the main - been happy. Hal's claims on behalf of "the boozy doubter's purgatory" make one wonder why these boozy doubters are so easily piqued by devout Catholic drinkers, particularly when so many boozers eventually "come in from the cold" to sip sacramental wine around a much larger table.
Out on the rim of the broken wheel, lonely regard for moonshine tends to be just that.
Attentively,
Alan Archibald
***
9/18/97
Editor, (Newsweek)
The opening paragraph of Germaine Greer's "Unmasking the Mother"
(Newsweek, 9/22/97) is so larded with sloppy logic I'm surprised Newsweek
editors let it pass.
Greer berates Mother Teresa for occupying a first class airline seat (a
seat that had been pre-arranged and pre-paid by people foreign to her
missionary organization), and then, in a dazzlingly self-centered
arabesque, tries to fault Mother Teresa for not consuming a single
sturgeon egg or drop of champagne. It seems to me yon Germaine doth
protest too much. Which end of the candle do you wish to burn my dear?
I would venture that Ms. Greer is comfortably ensconced in the ranks of
pop luminaries who shine only when their own celebrity is being toasted.
Like most modern cynics -- and strangely reminiscent of kindred spirits
who crucified the Nazarene -- Ms. Greer is incensed that relentless
goodness should reveal her own carefully concealed deficiencies. Irritated
by this rude - but unintentional - awakening, it is understandable that
Ms. Greer's eagerness to make peace with This World causes her to foam at
the mouth when contemplating someone who has made peace with The Next.
I doubt Ms. Greer is capable of conceiving that Mother Teresa's
globe-trotting marathons were trials rather than the festive occasions. Ms.
Greer presumes. As often happens, words reveal more than we intend.
Seemingly, it is Ms. Greer herself who genuflects at an altar of celebrity
that requires jet travel, clinking glasses and slavish adulation.
Ms. Greer's statement that Mother Teresa "rush(ed) in to grab the loot,
$30 million a year" is so void of credibility that one wonders if Germaine
is actually attacking Mother Teresa or, perhaps, trying to expunge her own
unresolved apostasy. Indeed, Mother Teresa insisted that her name and
image not be used in fund-raising efforts. She repeatedly declared that
"if God wants this work done, he will provide the money. If not, he
won't." Go ahead. Poll your friends. Not one of them has ever received a
fund-raising letter from the Missionaries of Charity.
From personal experience with Mother's missionary sisters and brothers, I
am aware that the Order performs desperately needed service throughout the
world. The task is daunting. In order to serve the poorest of the poor --
whose fetid stench, physical decay and shrill lunacy are often beyond the
reach of government welfare efforts -- Mother Teresa and her sisters
succeed in creating loving relationships with people whose distress is so
alarming that few dare to approach, much less love, them. Newsweek
readers would perhaps be intrigued to see how Ms. Greer - and her "sisters"
- would perform under identical circumstances. Picking maggots out of open
sores takes a toll on manicured nails.
As for Ms. Greer's rambling allegation that Mother Teresa cultivated an
image of India as "a hideous place", there is no record that Mother Teresa
ever failed to honor the religious, cultural and human richness of the
Indian sub-continent. Indeed, India's delight in considering Mother "one
of their own" was amply evident at her funeral.
On the other hand, the behavioral residue of the caste system - and the
widespread Indian belief that one's karmic fate is irrevocably
self-invoked - tends to justify the definitive dismissal of the
downtrodden. Had I not known that "Unmasking the Mother" was written by
Ms. Greer, I would have assumed the author was a curmudeonly colonialist;
certainly not a liberated - or liberating - human being.
As Ms. Greer points out, charity abounds in India, but to say that
"begging can only be a huge industry in India because people give" is akin
to claiming that the American welfare system exists only because we
gringos are so profoundly generous. Such socio-political naivete spotlights the
disdain of a highly theoretical woman who seems so full of personal and
intellectual vainglory that she is compelled to vent her bloated spleen on
the rest of the world.
It is a shame that the "tang of reproach" which Ms. Greer noted in "the
reverend mother of the convent where I went to school" failed to kindle in
Germaine any ability to examine her own conscience.
Attentively,
Alan Archibald
PS A provocative criticism that might have been laid at Mother's door was
her ingenuous acceptance of donations from sources as dubious as Papa Doc
Duvalier. Interestingly, Greer - in her ideological rush to savage Mother
Teresa - fails to exploit this real weakness.
***
10/99
Editor (Independent),
Patrick O'Neill's "Loyalty Oath" is so focused on one particular Tree that
it fails to see the Forest.
It's not so much the Pledge of Allegiance (in isolation), but the entire
gestalt of Compulsory Government Schooling that engenders a nation of
flag-waving sheep.
In the main, Compulsory Government Schooling is designed to create passive
consumers, enthralled by each "new-and-improved" version of "bread and
circuses."
I have taught in Public Schools at the elementary, middle school and high
school levels. I have served as a Central Office administrator. The
strictly hierarchical structures I've encountered are typically
anti-democratic, often despotic. With good reason O'Neill quotes Maria
Montessori: "The true concept of liberty is practically unknown to
educators."
Compulsory Government Schooling specializes in substantive inequality,
exculpating itself with ersatz gestures of superficial
"multi-culturalism." Patrick bemoans the shoddy treatment accorded
minorities in the nation's public schools, but only glimpses those rare
instances that escape the System's control.
Abuse and dishonor are not exceptional: they are the System's daily bread.
Under the sway of Compulsory Government Schooling -- and the spin doctors
who daily resurrect its corpse -- the Nation is increasingly unable (as
Susan Sontag recently observed) "to even ask any moral questions."
Patrick would make better use of his skills as an educational advocate by
quitting the grip of Compulsory Government Schooling altogether. By doing
"an end run," he would bypass the obfuscation, interference and intrinsic
counterproductivity that characterize contemporary public instruction.
It is hard to argue against Public Instruction since -- like the broader
culture it perpetuates -- its well-groomed surfaces often shine.
However, this superficial grooming hides a barely repressed shadow side,
which -- when it lunges from under its rock -- looks a lot like Littleton.
Attentively,
Alan Archibald
***
Editor (Independent),
I almost stopped reading Godfrey Cheshire's diffidently expressed
approval of the "Taste of Cherries." Then, I was seized by his reference
to the "communal" aspect of suicide.
There is an unacknowledged urge in the modern psyche to make
suicide a social event.
People do not need Jack Kevorkian's technical assistance as much
as they need social sanction to end their lives.
Oddly, this unacknowledged need for social sanction is revealed by
the self-slaughter at Heaven's Gate.
Thirty eight people killed themselves. Not surprisingly, the event made headline news.
Yet not one news outlet commented on the remarkable ease and consummate efficiency
with which these space cadets snuffed out their lives.
How could we stonewall the effortlessness of this massive
enterprise?
Three dozen people take a sedative, lace on their Nikes, and
then place plastic bags over their heads.
Not one of these would-be suicides reconsidered the macabre
finality of their slowly unfolding decision. Once they laid down on their
individual beds, not one balked. Not one said: "This is more wacko than
Waco! I'm getting the hell out of here!"
And when it was done, not one of us said: "Damn! That was easy!
Iwonder why the assisted-suicide movement gets so lathered?"
I can not explain the many interactive impulses that lead to the
demand for socially sanctioned suicide. But it is wrong for us to pretend
that the mechanics of self-slaughter require a physician's expertise.
Suicide is a difficult decision.
It should be a difficult decision.
To render suicide another "prescribed" activity -- to be performed
in a socially sanctioned setting -- is to belittle the pitch and moment of
this appropriately agonizing choice.
We should not delude ourselves. If we really arrive at the determination to take our own life,
the practical mechanics of suicide are as easy as "bagging it." As recent events have born out,
Heaven's Gate may be crossed with extraordinary calm.
If the Nikes are a valid indicator, suicide may even be performed with a sense of humor.
It is, perhaps, the collapse of social support that undergirds many modern motivations to end life.
Instead of restoring the social support that once made life an transcendental good, we
now demand but sufficient support to end life whenever we deem it bad.
Can the demand for minimalist Muzak be far behind?
The socialization of suicide does not uproot the great questions
which inhabit death's bourn. Rather, "social suicide" fosters our
collective carelessness and ratifies a slowly emerging consensus that Big
Questions needn't be asked at all.
Attentively,
Alan Archibald
***
9/98
Editor (Independent),
It's a pleasure to read Hal Crowther's well-written articles.
Hal's willingness to "Give it a Rest" (September 2-8, 1998) is a
welcome departure from our national obsession with "The Job of Sex."
As Hal points out, "sex is the party no one wants to leave." I
wish Hal provided more insight into the philosophical underpinnings of
this party. Instead, he issues an oddly determinist observation that "sex
is bigger than politics, economics and religion combined."
Maybe...
A measured assessment might also take into account the
incalculable cultural impact of a celibate carpenter and three millennia
of Buddhist monks. While contemplating the shallow detritus of
voluptuaries from "Don Juan" to "Madonna," we must also contend with the
chaste asceticism of Teresa of Avila and Francis of Assisi.
Perhaps "sex, unacknowledged, is the ground zero of wishful
thinking," but the implicit dismissiveness of this statement ignores the
fundamental role played by wishful thinking in the development of
civilization.
Thirty years ago, it was popular to characterize the nascent
"sexual revolution" as part of a larger cultural urge to "let 'it' all
hang out."
Brief reflection on the plutocratic/pharmaceutic push to transform
Viagra and Testerex into "essential goods," makes one wonder whether
humankind's effort to contain "it'" wasn't the real Text of human
progress, whereas compulsive sexual expression may soon be recorded as The
Footnote whereby culture was undone.
Even Freud recognized the direct relationship between civilization
and the sublimation of sexual energy. Sadly, Hal has not achieved escape
velocity from the orbit of Freud whose fixated sexual outlook (coupled
with his cocaine habit) created dubious delusions concerning the
centrality of sex.
When Freud's heir apparent, Carl Jung, finally broke with Sigmund,
it was due to his growing realization that the religious instinct -- i.e.,
humankind's primary need to humble itself before the Mysterium Magnum of
which we are part -- was more fundamental than the sexual instinct.
Whether or not Jung was right, he at least expressed an ideological
position which Freudians - then, and now - painstakingly repress.
Hal's materialist model of reality is profoundly instructive.
However, great value gets lost when the purported primacy of "matter" is
not tempered by another set of hypotheses based on the centrality of
spirit.
Whether one agrees with the following statements, they are both
tenable hypotheses: 1.) "Human beings are primates whose baboon essence
does everlasting battle with humankind's ecclesiastical fictions," and
2.) "We are not human beings trying to be spiritual. We are spiritual
being trying to be human."
The hyper-sexualized root of America's endlessly prurient "party"
has given rise to a feeble culture that's a billion miles wide, and six
inches deep.
Our determination to "milk" these six inches for every cubic
centimeter of luscious liquid they contain prevents us from going deeper.
We are shoal-stranded: we are terminally shallow.
Obsessed by the clockwork pleasure surging in -- and around --
those delectable six inches, the nation's collective attention clamped
onto Bill Clinton's zipper the very day John Paul II arrived in Cuba for
his epochal encounter with Fidel Castro. How many "Independent" readers
are aware that the Pope used his Havana podium to excoriate consumer
culture and cowboy capitalism? In comparison with Clinton's economic
policy, the Pope might be mistaken for Marx himself. If such spirited
attacks on modern excess are the outcome of celibate sublimation, dose me
again....
Back on American shores -- having mistaken a prurient itch for
lasting satisfaction -- we await the panting details of Slick Willy's
willy, Willey and will he?
Our national obsession with sex pollutes everything. It's as if we
had discovered a Great Good and then corrupted it through the same mistake
Midas made. Lacking a "Golden Mean," we turned everything into precious -
but lifeless - metal. Ironically, we have the wealth to purchase an
unprecedentedly wide-range of pleasures, but lack the psycho-spiritual
health to enjoy them. Oscar Wilde predicted America's fate when he noted
that "cynics know the price of everything and the value of nothing."
Which reminds me, how much does a dose of Viagra cost?
Even the lives of our children --- most notably Jon Benet Ramsey --- have
been debased by the universal mandate to declare priapism a virtue rather than a disease.
The Jon Benet case has assumed mythic proportion because
we're all attracted to the sexual saturation that fosters pre-adolescent beauty
queens endowed with the dubious grace of chrome-pole strippers.
Chesterton (whom Hal credits anonymously with the observation that
"sex is a Great Secret") believed that the modern world had taken an
essentially "wrong turn" and that it would be necessary to undergo a great
purge in order to re-chart our course, just as Chesterton argued that the
Dark Ages were the centuries-long "fast" by which Europe rid itself of
Roman decadence.
In this modern era, we are resolved - at least in fantasy - to
ensconce our "heads" in chambers so dark we need glass belly buttons to
see out.
Whether we awaken spontaneously from our erotic dreams -- or, if
rude circumstance awakens us -- there has been no shortage of keen
commentary describing the bleak milestones along our mobius dead-end.
Tennessee Williams noted "the deadening coarseness of sexual
obsession" and the fact that many moderns perform "their act of love like
jabbing a hypodermic needle to which they're addicted, but which is more
and more empty of real interest and surprise."
Elsewhere on the spectrum of sexual disillusion, Norman Mailer
described obsessive sexual activity as "jamming a piece of suet up a
drainpipe."
"If this is the result of sexual honesty in school and the media,
I advocate a return to virgin worship, arranged marriages and vicious nuns
with rulers."
Although Hal chortles disbelievingly at his own assessment, it is
notable that virgin worship has a far more honorable history than phallus
(or yoni) worship; that most East Indians enjoy their arranged marriages;
and that "the vicious nuns" have always done a demonstrably better job
educating the nation's young than government schools which warp the
population with daily doses of The Official Story.
It might prove tonic to ask which of the following is more
vicious? ... to use a rule(r) to insure a measure of discipline based on belief in
sexual restraint and the Greater Good of the over-arching Community, or,
to spawn pre-teen sexual predators, who know nothing of The Common Good
and whose pre-maturely active penises are used like lethal clubs?
Attentively,
Alan Archibald
***
6/98
Editor (Newsweek),
Although my soul aches for anyone blindsided by the brutal
finality of suicide, Robert Brudno's "Unfinished Business" (June 1st, My
Turn) does not mend fences.
Instead, he surveys the wreck of Vietnam and enjoins us to lend
"support whatever the cause, whatever the result."
In an understandable attempt to relieve the incalculable pain of
his loss, Mr. Brudno mistakes a stronger dose of the disease for the cure.
The enduring notion that Americans should support their country
"right or wrong" underlies the misguided pride that regularly pollutes our
foreign affairs.
Enthralled by thoughtless patriotism, we continue to raise our
children to accept the authority of government without question. Such
witless submission to "The Official Story" is not a truth I deem
self-evident.
Were we as committed to the well-being of our young as to the
perpetuation of institutional "power," we would teach our children
unvarnished history, presenting the full spectrum of our nobility and
wickedness. Together, this balanced view of light and dark would serve as
grist for the joint mill of morality and dialectical reflection.
Imagine a day when America's children are so well-trained in the
disciplines of truth that they spurn any belligerence wrought by
bureaucracies which deliberately ignore the havoc they unleash.
Alan Brudno was, in fact, "mortally wounded back here" by a system
of inter-locking, acculturative mechanisms that didn't even let him
speculate that the Vietnam horror might be ill-advised.
Attentively,
Alan Archibald
***
Dear editor,
Albert Camus commented that "Genius is having a profound grasp of
the obvious."
Newsweek's March 2, 1998 edition contained two inter-related
articles that begged further examination.
"A Scare in the West" informed readers that Neo-Nazis can purchase
bubonic plague bacteria through the mail.
In "Saddam's Secret World" we learn of Washington's frenzied
efforts to destroy Iraq's biological weapons capability.
Even if Saddam were twice the fool he seems, why would he expend
needless energy to manufacture agents of mass destruction when American
agents can purchase these tools on the open market?
Saddam may not be a genius. Then again, it doesn't take a rocket
scientist to be a rocket scientist.
Attentively,
Alan Archibald
***
2/98
Editor (Independent),
Despite your panting effort, the Independent's "Summer of Love"
edition did not take a "Positive" Look at Sex.
Carl Jung noted that "sex is eternally problematic. Too little sex
makes our spirit anemic; too much gives lopsided emphasis to our animal
nature."
No matter how one defines the role of sex, it is a bald fact that
teenage males -- given license -- will f___ anything that moves.
In light of this eternal combat between the male sexual urge and
the need to honor each individual's personhood, it is fortunate that some
measure of sexual suppression exists.
Admittedly, suppression does, at times, cross the boundary into
pathological repression.
However, to reify the human body - as your cover does - by showing
"it" without eyes and other personalizing facial features - is a classic
display of depersonalization rooted in fixated genital sexuality.
The political "left" - to which I belong (in my idiosyncratic way)
- continually bounces between the mutually untenable poles of assuming
that The Truth is "obvious" to anyone with eyes to see, and the capricious
urge to redefine "truth" whenever re-definition suits its pragmatic
intent.
For example, the Canadian Supreme Court has - rightly I believe -
ruled that heterosexual pornography is intrinsically "harmful to women."
Not surprisingly, Phil Harvey (founder of "Adam and Eve," a North Carolina
"sex aids" emporium) will not countenance such claptrap.
In league with deconstructionist allies who re-define prostitution
as "sex work," -- in the fey hope that nomenclatural change will diminish
the essential tawdriness of selling one's body -- "Adam and Eve" employs a
team of "psychologists" who "certify" that the wo/men who strip/fuck in
Harvey's films are vanguard rebels dedicated to personal, social and
political liberation.
In your photo of Harvey, we observe the aging warrior himself,
brandishing his signature condom like a sacred badge. Try as he may,
the condom remains a shop-worn ruse to obfuscate his role as an unrepentant pornographer. (I was amused - but not surprised - by how many of your "Adam and Eve" product reviews found fault with the fabrication, function or exorbitant cost of these sex
toys, most of which display the embarrassing silliness and sad desperation that characterize "adult" entertainment.)
Harvey's "understanding" of human sexuality trivializes an
unparalleled vehicle for interpersonal communication.
To claim -- alongside the Independent's tester of the "Super
Stretch Sleeve" -- that "if it fits like a glove, it must be love," is to
affirm a grotesque confusion of the physical and the metaphysical.
Will your "Super Stretch Sleeve" tester go fuck himself again?
And again? And again?
"Probably. After all, love can do some crazy things."
America's problem is not lack of sex, but confusion of sex with
love. Erecting a phallic Tower of Babel on this mistaken premise, we
hasten to fill the gaping void in our lives -- not with the infinitely
diverse textures of dedicated relationship and communitarian commitment --
but by excessive focus on the hyper-excitation of genital encounter, as if
filling a vagina (or a rectum) were the solution to our personal, social
and political heart-ache.
Although sexual liberation sounds plausible - and often imperative
- to juvenile ears, its net effect is the normalization of arrested
development.
Your "Summer of Love" edition gives no indication that "Fall" and
"Winter" are just around the corner, and that we will all grow old and
die, (events which the Great Religions anticipate with a startling blend
of awe and hope.) The delusional fantasies of human sexuality propagated
by Mr. Harvey -- based as they are on the denial of death -- seduce the
sexually inexperienced into "arrested development" as a way-of-life.
In the end, the psycho-spiritual "stuckness" engendered by this
misdirected sexual energy causes more pain than pleasure.
For many Americans, this ironic revelation comes into focus only
after youth has fled and flesh softened. By then -- having invested one's
adulthood in sexual child's play -- it is far too threatening to admit the
mistake of a lifetime.
When -- finally -- Philip Harvey's sexual miscreants hear the
panicked whisper of a "wrong road taken," it will be easier for most to
live out their three score and ten chasing the consolations of
depersonalized - and depersonalizing - sexuality, rather than charting a
new course toward agape and the limitless passion that fires it.
Attentively,
Alan Archibald
***
12/98
Editor (Independent),
"Wanna Teach?" (by Bob Geary, 12/16-22/98) attempts to validate
many guidelines laid down by State Departments of Education.
To devise his validation, Mr. Geary portrays Rep. Fran Shubert as
a conservative whose prime directive is to corrode the splendor of The
Academy and the luciferous system of Public Instruction that has
painstakingly been put in place.
I'm unfamiliar with Shubert's overall record.
Generally, I'm cynical of politicians --- more so those on the
right than the left. However, no matter how benighted Ms. Shubert's
conservatism, it is foolish to forget that "even broken clocks are right
twice a day."
We might also recall that parents -- regardless the extent of
their formal training -- often have a sixth sense concerning structures
and policies that "short" their kids.
Parents of minority children are even better attuned to buncombe
and abuse.
Ten years ago I was a lateral-entry public school teacher in the
State of North Carolina. I quit The System after experiencing - and
witnessing - the commonplace outrages visited upon Anthony Solari, whom
Geary erroneously represents as an exception to the rule. (I might add
that Mr. Solari and I now both teach at UNC-Chapel Hill.)
Two guiding principles undergird Public Instruction.
One such priniciple is embedded in Adolf Hitler's observation that
"by means of shrewd lies, unremittingly repeated, it is possible to make
people believe that heaven is hell - and hell heaven... The great masses
of people will more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a small one."
The other principle --- also well-aligned with Hitler's rubric of
pervasive prevarication --- is that our instructional System is committed
to "quality."
To the contrary, the bulk of Public School administrators construe
quality as a threat. Quality --- and the independent spirit from which it
grows --- are deemed mortal threats to the absolute power held by State
Departments of Instruction.
It is misleading for Mr. Geary to declare that "custodial care" is
a recent corruption of Public Instruction. If one looks with steady gaze,
it soon becomes clear that Public Schools have long been places of
custodial care --- among the most dangerous and damaging places where
tender spirits might be consigned.
The upshot of these "principles" is that the Public School System
has become fertile ground for America's Official Story --- the same
Official Story that recently resulted in a 417 to 5 (sic) congressional
vote approving those twinkling "points of light" over Baghdad.
Stars of wonder, stars of night, stars of fury burning bright.
Ah! For a gentler, kinder America...
And lastly -- to salt the wound -- our instructional systems are
determined to make mediocrity acceptable.
To cut through these multiple veils of mendacity, I suggest that
all hiring decisions be made by teams of Master Teachers (selected by
their peers) who observe candidates in actual teaching situations without
knowing whether prospective pedagogues are in possession of the State's
silly credential.
The decisions of these teams would be final and binding.
If "The Proof" is not "in the pudding," it will not be found in
certificates accessible to anyone with enough money to buy the "privilege"
of sitting in State-specified seats until The Academy has completed its
tedious hazing, a procedure not unlike the endless bombings
which the White House, Pentagon and dumbed-down American populace have
pre-approved for the people of Iraq.
One thing is certain: America will not become a civilized country
until we escape the enchantment of public sector educators who insist that
radical change is un-necessary, and that anyone proposing radical change
is necessarily an enemy of liberality, integrity and conscience.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton observed that: "...there are others whose
state of mind is still more extraordinary. They not only do not need the
landscape to corroborate their history, but they do not care if the
landscape contradicts their history... If the map marks the place as a
waterless desert, they will declare it as dry as a bone, though the whole
valley resound with the rushing river. A whole huge rock will be invisible
if a little book on geology says it is impossible. This is at the opposite
extreme to the irrational credulity of the rustic, but it is infinitely
more irrational... This great delusion of the prior claim of printed
matter, as something anterior to experience and capable of contradicting
it, is the main weakness of modern urban society.
The chief mark of the modern man has been that he has gone through
a landscape with his eyes glued to a guidebook, and could actually deny in
the one, anything that he could not find in the other. (William Cobbett)
however, happened to look up from the book and see things for himself; he
was a man of too impatient a temper, and later he showed too hasty a
disposition to tear the book up or toss the book away. But there had been
granted to him a strange and high and heroic sort of faith. He could
believe his eyes."
State-sponsored Systems of Public Instruction would pluck out our
jellied orbs.
Between Democratic Capitalism (masquerading as a form of
government bent on The Common Good) and the psychological colonization
imposed by Public Instruction (and televised celebrity culture,) it is
difficult to say which agency displays greater "insolence of office."
Fifty years ago, it was sufficient for Dwight Eisenhower to finger
the "military-industrial complex."
More recently, intellectual rigor requires people of conscience to
decry an upstart Trinity properly designated as the "military-industrial-educational" complex.
Attentively,
Alan Archibald
(I recommend "Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American
History Textbook Got Wrong," by James W. Loewen, The New Press, NYC, 1995)
***
2/13/99
Editor (Independent),
Hal Crowther's essay, "We're History" (February 10-16) depicts the
nation's power-brokers as "perverted and ambitious, animated by passions,
crimes and great disasters."
Perhaps Hal is overly focused on the "mountebanks and frauds" who
"serve" as front-men (front-persons?) for the System, while
underestimating the tidal pull of culture itself. As Wendell Berry
observed: "The problem is not bad politics: it's a bad way of life."
It is increasingly painful to witness the trivial workings of
power in a culture that is - as Neil Postman observed - "amusing itself to
death."
American institutions have collaborated long and hard to convert
us into interchangeable "consumer-units" --- cradle-to-grave shoppers
convinced that each fabricated "want" will soon become an "essential
need."
In lockstep sequence, we first became wanton; then proceeded to
consume every post-industrial opiate, hoping that one of these "designer
drugs" would eventually satisfy the soul.
In 1922, Chesterton noted that "Materialism is really our
established Church."
America's devotion to Materialism -- and its joined-at-the-hip
twin, Utilitarianism -- reduces history to absurdity, making
transcendental quest impossible and sexual obsession inevitable.
If human nature is in fact limited to instinctually mandated
behaviors, then we should expect - as Hal reported in a recent essay -
that the 500 most popular Internet sites are pornographic.
Hey! As long as it doesn't hurt anybody...
Having agreed that we are animals with no roots deeper than
zoology, what's left to discuss but the Pleasure Principle --- preferably
in its more extreme manifestations?
I am not arguing here for the existence of God, but rather for a
minimalist - one might say a "utilitarian" - requirement that human beings
act "as if God were real" if human affairs are to be animated by any
principle other than prurience or pleasure. (I realize this argument will
make no sense to those not yet middle aged, and that America keeps its
elders at arm's length, if not in convalescent homes.)
Given prevailing cultural currents, we choose from a sanctioned
list of "value-free" aspirations set forth by "the guardians" of
autonomous technopoly even though our lives and livelihoods are regularly
rendered "value-less" in the process.
We are extremely well-provisioned people --- impeccably trained
(as technicians), too clever by half, able to extrude astute analyses of
problems-we're-still-struggling-to-create, determined to impose a morally
bankrupt vision on a world finally conditioned to cheer our
techno-heroics.
And through it all, we remain compulsively absent from our own
lives.
The Mad Chase is afoot and no one has patience to possess their
soul. "Things are in the saddle and ride mankind." We are cogs, flogged by a Machine
that methodically salts the Ground of Being while deifying velleity and passion.
Meanwhile, Academia, Media, Industry, Journalism, Finance, Politics and most
of the Arts validate this New World Order in which technique is glorified and people reified.
Nor has Religion escaped the clutch of Moloch's intent. Now more
than ever, nominal practitioners have become part of the problem, not the solution.
All of us are suborned cheerleaders, witlessly rooting for the demise of history, if not the end of time.
Gandhi observed that "there is more to life than increasing its
speed."
Alternatively, America's secular Religion establishes Speed as the
Central Dogma of the Great god "Progress."
It doesn't matter "where" we are going; only that we get there faster.
Our unswerving dedication to this mindless progression --
carefully propagandized as "progress" -- becomes "curiouser and curiouser"
when we consider the mass of evidence that, finally, "there's no there
there."
Heaven forbid we ask any of the right questions.
We're too busy "staying on task."
Besides, our obligatory aimlessness makes it inappropriate - if
not gauche - to speak of "final ends" or "first causes," the only
meta-level levers which might rescue us from terminal meaninglessness.
And so, each of us pays extortionate rent to occupy this Cowardly
New World, predicated on the primacy of brute survival, glossed with the
neophiliac seduction of "The New & Improved."
In this craven kingdom of "things in the saddle," only "means"
matter --- and these means are increasingly mean-spirited.
According to the received wisdom, the twin concubines -- "Speed"
and "Progress" -- will be miraculously transformed by "the invisible hand"
of the omniscient marketplace into loving spouses who tend hearth in our
atomized pleasure domes.
Ah, in Xanadu...
American politicians have long slept with anyone who can slip, unseen,
into their stately mansions.But we focus on these front-men at our peril.
Each of us is in bed with our worst enemy.
Attentively,
Alan Archibald
***
2/20/98
Editor (Independent),
Hal Crowther's analysis of "the septic emergency" afflicting the
fourth estate is well drawn. ("Hell to the Chief", February 18-24, 1998)
However, random allegations and senseless acts of mudslinging
should not distract us from the core issue.
How do Monica Lewinsky, Linda Tripp, obscure congregations of
Buddhist nuns and pay-as-you-go PAC-men secure such intimate contact with
the President of the United States?
The fact that Linda Tripp receives an annual salary of $88,000.00
- and that Bill Clinton is paid thrice that amount - confirms my suspicion
that technocrats and policy wonks are plutocratic flunkies ---
bottle-necking gatekeepers receiving tidy sums of blood money to prevent
vision from rooting inside The Beltway.
Small town gossips Lewinsky and Tripp elicit the same embarrassment
once reserved for the President should he conduct Affairs of State with his zipper down.
No more.
Hal rightly impugns Monica Lewinsky by turning her own testimony
against her: "I was brought up on lies. That's how you got along. I have
lied my entire life". Nevertheless, to dismiss Lewinsky on these grounds
-- without examining the lawyerly muteness that intermittently besets our
otherwise garrulous president -- is akin to "the pot calling the kettle
black."
Can Mr. Crowther name a dozen contemporary politicians who would
not confess lifelong patterns of falsehood should they - in a moment of
weakness - muster a small measure of Ms. Lewinsky's candor?
Bill Clinton's ferocious reluctance to provide straightforward
answers to gnawing questions recalls the quip: "'How do you know when a
lawyer's lying?' (Answer:) 'His lips are moving.'"
I have no idea if President Clinton is guilty of the many
allegations infecting his airspace. I do know his pre-trial posturing
suggests a slick lawyer trying to dodge the necessity of "taking the
fifth."
Without detailing the widening rift between the planet's rich and
poor -- a phenomenon exacerbated by Clinton's "globalizing economics" -- I
confess wonderment at Hal's triumphant reference to America's current
'moment' as embodying our "greatest influence and prosperity."
What essay will Hal write when Clinton's pending climax ignites
"points of light" all over Bagdhad? If such random acts of thuggishness
constitute the apogee of American "influence," then the sorry state of
American journalism has found a fit bed-partner in Bill Clinton.
History will judge Mr. Clinton.
In the meantime, he has obliged his contemporaries to believe he
will bed anyone.
Attentively,
Alan Archibald
***
3/12/99
Editor (Independent),
Recently, a friend recalled Carl Jung's belated renunciation of
Nazi Germany. In self-defense, Jung noted that everyone who participates
in a culture tends to accept its unexamined suppositions, even though
their superficial criticism may be scathing.
"The Real Culture War" displays Hal Crowther's customary
brilliance. Yet, two of his comments point to this deeper level of
"unexamined supposition."
"The resource gap between starving clubs and rich teams is so wide
that the have-nots have given up all pretense of competing." A half dozen
paragraphs later, we read that "the Greaseman... sells crude polemics and
vile politics to an audience of dangerous losers."
Wherever competition is a cornerstone of cultural aspiration, most
people lose. Even in the rarefied realms of well-developed expertise,
competition insures that half of all participants leave "the arena" in an
emotional state indistinguishable from clinical depression.
At the grass roots, American-style competition insures that
"common folk" relinquish their integrity to over-achieving "experts" who
eagerly "outperform" one another in a relentless effort to provide
ever-more-clever renditions of "the unexamined life."
Conditioned to idolize "the best and the brightest," most folks
slide into sluggish spectatorship, staring wide-eyed at their religious
disillusion and political dissolution.
Deprived of meaningful choice by the culture's compulsion to
"succeed," most people quietly accept their fate as "losers."
In this world of Ted Turner "winners" and Willie Loman "losers"
there is acute need for a persuasive argument against "success."
Lamentably, there is now little reference to the once commonplace
observation that "everything contains the seeds of its own destruction."
Whatever its erstwhile utility, the competitive drive to succeed
-- as distinct from the self-generated (dare I say "God-given") urge to
create -- has become America's most dangerous toxin.
As "The Real Culture War" grinds on, I advocate for more of Grampa
Noll's semi-professional ball-playing, simultaneously disenfranchising
Yanqui powerhouses whose sublimated bloodsport re-enacts
"the Christians" and "the Lions."
Attentively,
Alan Archibald
***
July 15, 1999
Editor (Independent),
In his recent essay, "God's Holy Fire," Hal Crowther acknowledges
Reynolds Price and Annie Dillard as "beacons in the fog for the
disillusioned minority that might become drab atheists."
However, Hal's own faith is ultimately invested in a form of
reason that decides against the possibility of "a loving, caring God."
To make his case for the incompatibility of reason and a loving
God, Hal quotes Dillard's datum that there is "an annual death toll of 30
million children under 5."
What would Hal make of the fact that until 1750 A. D., half of all
human beings died before the age of 8?
Our ancestors -- far less sensitive than Hal and I, far less
accustomed to soul-softening consolations -- accepted suffering and death,
and still managed to extrude the genius of Mozart, Bach, Dante, Milton,
Francis, Aquinas, Cervantes, Da Vinci and Michelangelo. Such scope
highlights the unacknowledged narrowness of modern liberalism.
The nearest the 20th century has come to such titanic coupling of
intellectual force, steadiness of gaze and magnanimity of spirit is in the
person of Gilbert Keith Chesterton who, in keeping with the main thrust of
Judeo-Christianity, insisted that humankind is whipsawed by the ongoing
result of a primordial "shipwreck" --- that what is evident to our senses
reveals only part (an often honorable but frequently terrifying part) of
what will be revealed as the mysterion plays itself out.
We may indeed camp here, but it is perilous to call this place
home. Annie Dillard's best-known book, "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek," bears
witness to this same message of exile and pilgrimage.
History may record that the great heresy of the 20th century was
our attempt to declare Reason "sufficient," when, in fact, it is a single
tool among many --- a tool, which, if invested with primacy, results in
the unprecedented ravages of reason-run-rampant and the ever-bloody plans
of "the best and the brightest," the same folks who brought us Viet Nam
and who now earnestly sketch the lineaments of planet-trashing
"globalization."
H. L. Mencken (whose eponymous prize Hal has won) was no friend of
religion. Yet late in life he voiced unexpected praise for (Roman
Catholic) Christianity, saying that "life is indeed more like a poem than
a equation."
It is the usurpation of poetry by the presumptuous self-certainty
of data-drunk rationalists -- the bloody sacrifice of imagination on the
altar of knowledge -- that compelled Chesterton's observation that "to be
merely modern is to confine oneself to ultimate narrowness."
It may be foolish -- perhaps divinely foolish -- to believe with
Einstein that "imagination is more important than knowledge."
But it is ultimately claustrophobic and paradoxically
self-destructive to conclude that the mysterium magnum does not transcend
the predictable purview and too-common despair that attend
disproportionate faith in reason.
Thomas Aquinas, who laid the cornerstone of Western rationality,
held that "sin" is always characterized by loss of splendor and loss of
perspective. Left to its own Mephistophelean devices, reason epitomizes
this latter loss.
And so, having lost any perspective vouchsafed by a transcendent
touchstone, we have sunk into unbridled subjectivity, a swamp of sheer
imminence made more miasmic by deconstructionist academics who insist that
Existence does not even harbor the possibility of splendor.
William Blake declared that "we become what we perceive." If
Blake's vision is true - or if creative imagination might make it true - I
would sooner believe that we are children of a loving God than manipulable
consumer units - adrift in a sea of market research - desperately eager
that the guardians of Technopoly inform us which capricious want shall
become our next irrepressible need.
And then....
S/he who dies with the most toys, wins.
Attentively,
Alan Archibald
***
"I thought that in princely dwellings folk would exhibit a higher
moral quality since they possess all the copious plenitude that may adorn
our nature. I found it the reverse Uranio. Men of high lineage were swift
to promise, but vastly slack in performance, and I found them the foes of
all simple goodness; gentle and reposed in aspect, but swollen in pride
like the whole sea. A race fair to outward seeming only...
What elsewhere is deemed virtue, here is held to be a defect. Nay,
shame is imputed to the deed that is not crooked, to the love that is not
simulated, to the simplicity of holiness, the faith that may not be
broken, the guileless heart and the clean hand --- all these are held as
the marks of low spirit, mere dull stupidities, and trifles to call up a
laugh. Trick and lie; fraud and robbery; spoliation hypocritically
disguised; to grow fat with gifts and ruin another; to find one's glory in
another's fall; these are the "manly" distinctions of this perfidious
crew... They are unrepressed by shame; respecting neither the claims of
affection nor those of blood; with no memory of any act of kindness. In a
word, nothing is more worshipful, holier, more conspicuously right, than
all the exact opposite of their vast hunger for court distinctions, their
ravenous appetite for gain."
Torquato Tasso
Born at Sorrento,
3/11/1544
***
3/00
Editor (Independent),
Howard Zinn's "Delusion 2000" is, itself, based on delusion.
Mr. Zinn asks "how can we support candidates who have nothing to say about the fact that our country, with 4 percent of the world's population, consumes 25 percent of its wealth?"
A more penetrating question would point the finger directly at ourselves and not at the poor bastards whose sorry fate makes them quadrennial whipping-boys.
Everyone is quick to espouse "curtailment of resource consumption." To compensate our environmental sins, do we not faithfully lug the recycling box to curbside? But beyond the window-dressing, how many of us do NOT yearn for salary increases, or the next "hot" IPO, or getting "cut in" on a lucrative options deal mechanisms whose upshot is the dizzying acceleration of an already reckless rate of resource utilization . Who among us does not want to be a millionaire?
Spiritually, psychologically and economically, we have scant idea how to live without shrieking one continuous "MORE!"
The problem is not bad politics but an abominable way of life. Politics is the scapegoat that circumvents the need "to become the change we wish to see in the world. (Gandhi)" Traditional politics is the arena in which we delude ourselves that policy initiatives have "profound impact," when, in fact, the warp and weft of culture is dependent on family health and the range of acculturative mechanisms by which we raise our young. Admittedly, there is interaction between policy and acculturation. However, the drift of democratic capitalism has been to erode family integrity, to undermine any acculturative process that might "break the box" or otherwise achieve "escape velocity."
Two particular areas beg redress.
One is our inability to acknowledge that "monopoly government schooling" serves as a control mechanism, perpetuating the status quo and the psycho-social chaos on which the existing "order" stands. Several years ago, our well-schooled citizenry chose representatives who voted 413 to 5 to bomb Bagdhad. Predictably, chest-thumbing natives loved it. Now, in the absence of a clearly defined enemy abroad, we settle for the increasingly frequent execution of dark-skinned natives, many of them scarred by the intrinsic dishonor of K-12 hazing.
The other item begging redress is our assumption that more and faster resource consumption is a mark of Progress. Could anything short of systematic indoctrination produce this witless belief? To emphasize the majesty of our achievement, we now proselytize "unlimited growth" as the sine qua non of enlightened "globalization."
Notably, the planet's most equitable resource distribution has taken place in the Indian state of Kerala, where 30 million people have a per capita annual income of $222.00, yet also enjoy life expectancy and literacy rates on a par with our own. Furthermore, Keralans are civilized enough to shun state-sponsored slaughter, in part because capital crimes and the psycho-social chaos which provokes them -- are not embedded in the matrix of culture.
Bred to a culture that enters "depression" the moment metastatic expansion ceases, it is refreshing to see that a steady-state economy actually works.
Attentively,
Alan Archibald
"Poverty is not the problem. Wealth is the problem. Poverty is the solution."
Satish Kumar, former Jain monk and current editor of "Resurgence" http://www.resurgence.org/
The wealthy make of poverty a vice. Plato
Growth has become addictive. Like heroin addiction, the habit distorts basic value judgments. Addicts of any kind are willing to pay increasing amounts for declining satisfactions. They are blind to deeper frustrations because they are absorbed in playing for always mounting stakes. Products that are new and improved promise the concept of being 'better', but leave the concept of 'whether or not good' for the individual or society completely unaddressed. Often new and better products create more wants, dependency, and dissatisfaction for most, and constantly renovate poverty for the poor. Ivan Illich
We Americans are an unprincipled nation, when you come down to it. Not that we're bad or anything. It's just that it's hard for us to pay attention to abstract matters when we have so many concrete matters -- cellular phones, ski boats, salad shooters, trail bikes, StairMasters, snow boards, pasta-making machines, four-door sport utility vehicles, palmcorders, rollerblade skates and CD players for our cars -- to occupy us. No wonder all the great intellectual concepts ... come from pastoral societies... P.J. O'Rourke
Without the inner beauty of a free and harmonious life, (fine food) and eau de cologne can become merely forms of barbarism. Without tolerance and broad spiritual understanding, hygiene will only make for clean animals, very clean and very healthy, but also very animal. External riches will merely smother us, if we do not cultivate inner riches. Miguel de Unamuno
It is the greatest of all advantages to enjoy no advantage at all. I found it invariably true, the poorer I am the richer I am. Thoreau
He is richest whose pleasures are cheapest. Thoreau
Everything is so relativized. I think we've got ourselves into a terrible jam there, with all kinds of ideologies that have taught us not to be judgemental. Not being judgemental also, in a way, means not thinking. Salman Rushdie, Mother Jones, July-August, 1999
***
2/28/00
Editor (Independent),
Hal Crowther's comparison of contemporary liberalism to McCarthyism (February 23-29) is apt.
However, Hal's wish to reinterpret the First Amendment in order to discourage "the Larry Flynts of the Internet from preying on children" makes me wonder where to begin the revision.
When the Constitution was ratified, applicable communication technologies were limited to megaphone and type set. Our current First Amendment quandary was not caused by these particular manifestations of speech and print.
Rather, we find ourselves confounded by the pre-emptive impact of pictorial imagery. Saturated by the superficiality of pictorial images, it has become impossible to conduct meaningful discourse. In hindsight, the Supreme Court's decision to outlaw "yelling 'Fire!' in a crowded theater" as if this were a meaningful contribution to First Amendment law -- seems laughably naïve, especially in contrast to the routine imagery that sets us all "afire."
Speech and press freedoms should guarantee anyone's right to yell anything --- even "Fire!" in a crowded theater.
If, however, we wish to reinterpret the First Amendment, it would be wise to recall the Framers' original intent. Here's a Truth we might hold to be self-evident. The authors of the Constitution did not intend the unimpeded spillage of pornographic, violent and otherwise degrading images. (One day, such spillage will be viewed as unregulated toxic waste disposal.)
Unfortunately, we are conditioned to believe that the First Amendment protects pictorial imagery. Consider Hollywood moguls whose livelihood depends on provocative images. These "guardians of the popular imagination" routinely spearhead neo-liberal causes without a moment's consideration of the role they played at Columbine. Yes, the NRA and Smith/Wesson were culprits. But Hollywood? I beg your pardon!
Interesting antecedents are afoot here. The 1st Commandment emphatically proscribes "graven images." On one hand, the outcome of this ancient "imagery ban" was the elimination of pictorial art in Jewish culture. Jewish temples displayed calligraphy and geometric patterns, but no representational images of man or beast. Simultaneously, by eliminating pictorial images, the First Commandment inculcated deep appreciation for "the Word," transforming Jewry into "the People of the Book."
By not dissipating attention on pictorial side-shows, Jews became unusually focused on the written and spoken word. The upshot of this attentiveness was the creation of a culture with unparalleled passion for higher-order thinking skills.
On the other hand, pictorial imagery tends to elicit visceral - rather than thoughtful - response. Note how television viewers stonewall thoughtful interaction with the universal utterance: "Shhh! I'm trying to watch this!" Not surprisingly, recent research revealed calamitous contraction in the range of vocabulary used by contemporary Americans.
Our national fondness for the passive consumption of images whether pornographic, violent, political or commercial leaves little time for conversation. In this discursive void, our larger cultural conversations become simple-minded sound-bites on those infrequent occasions when discourse rises above grunting.
Mind you, I like to grunt as much as the next guy. I too have been known to pick up stray copies of Playboy in order to lust after the Jimmy Carter interviews.
But, if our goal is to vivify the First Amendment so that it serves -- rather than corrodes -- culture, the crux of our current conundrum is not speech and print per se, but our de novo super-saturation with pictorial images that impassion us needlessly, simultaneously diminishing our ability to think, to speak, to read, to write and to interact with other living beings.
Attentively,
Alan Archibald
***
1/11/00
Editor (Independent),
Although Michael Ventura's recent discussion of "corporatization" was apt, the opening paragraphs of "Millenial Nudity" (January 5-11, 2000) were somewhat inflated.
In Ventura's view, everyone should have engaged millennial soul-searching
while the Gregorian calendar - which missed Christ's birth by 5 to 10
years - rolled into a new, arbitrary cipher.
"The press of history" may have transformed this New Year's trumpery into a moment many "will never forget," but for those of us who retired at 10:30 there is, I'm afraid, nothing to remember.
Was there anything to celebrate?
New Year's Eve represents the essence of pagan celebration: "there's no there there." This year was no different, save the thousand-fold amplification of the event's intrinsic vacuity.
Ventura laments that Y2K distracted many from more meaningful considerations such as "Who and what am I now? What should I be doing and why?"
On New Year's eve, I dined with the director of a Duke medical institute, and during the course of our conversation he persuaded me to turn off my computer until Monday afternoon.
What I discovered from this needless precaution --- this circumstantially-imposed electronic "fast" --- was the incomparable bliss of not having to genuflect before the phosphorescent time-bandit.
In lieu of my customary "cuts, pastes and clicks," my life tumbled into the lusciousness of untrammeled Reality. Time unfolded of its own accord. There was no rush, no hurry, no frenzied "accomplishment" devoid of lasting satisfaction.
An epiphany emerged from all this... "What I should be doing now" is foreswearing cyber-serfdom in favor of real life.
Three years ago, I disposed of my television. Perhaps the computer is next.
I don't want to be overly hard on Mr. Ventura. He regularly graces us with substantial insight. However, it is a rare essay in which his writing doesn't reveal a significant admixture of "Calaughforlornia."
A native New Yorker, Ventura's move west has exposed him to new forms of hype and hyper-acceleration. In many ways, California is its own pontificate, preaching novelty as its central dogma, sacrificing virgins to the fascism of fashion, each new velleity morphing so fast that History and Contemplation become obnoxious intrusions.
Attentively,
Alan Archibald
***
10/17/97
Editor (Prism),
Mother Teresa's "Home for the Dying" is neither hospice nor
hospital.
Mother Teresa's Calcutta "Home for the Dying" is what its name
claims; a place to die.
The "Home" insures that people will not die - untouched - in
offal-clogged gutters.
It is hard for first-worlders to contemplate Calcutta without
projecting the prejudices of wealth onto Third World street-people.
Calcutta's "Home for the Dying" is the mirror image of a
catastrophe triage station. Instead of determining who might survive --
while letting the mortally wounded die unattended -- Mother Teresa's
sisters gather the broken bodies of the moribund and take them "Home."
I have never known any supporter of Mother Teresa's work who
mistook the Calcutta "Home" as a hospice or medical facility.... two
fairly widespread misconceptions among people who rely on the secular
press. At times, some of the people taken "Home" do suffer from treatable
diseases that remain undiagnosed. For some observers -- always observers
who live outside India -- this oversight inspires bitter recrimination.
In the global scheme of human suffering, I marvel that we
"northerners" routinely spend $150,000.00 to beat back lymphoma with
marrow transplants and laminar flow isolation rooms even though this same
sum could be used to inoculate entire countries against polio. Just 200
cases of "heroic" cancer treatment consume the equivalent of Mother
Teresa's world-wide operating budget.
Where are the voices of recrimination when needed most?
When I moved to Sandinista Nicaragua to teach at the Managua
Medical School, I advocated vehemently on behalf of simple sterile
procedures in municipal hospitals. However, as I grew accustomed to water
shortages, electrical blackouts and broken windows allowing flies to swarm
in torrid operating rooms, I settled for a plain plastic swatter as the
most appropriate means of discouraging "Beelzebub's minions" from settling
on "cracked" chests and prolapsed uteruses.
On one occasion I visited the National Leprosarium to document a
case of blastomycosis. Dona Mirjinda, a Miskito Indian woman, was so badly
infected that her leg had become mesmerizing in its repulsiveness. It took
me a full year - and "string pulling" on two continents - to get someone
to donate a course of the appropriate fungicide. The drug "only" cost
$300.00, but I was living on $100.00 per month.
Tell me: was the life-saving medicine "cheap", or "prohibitively
expensive"?
Christopher Hitchens has led the attack on Mother Teresa. He
highlights an episode in which the missionary nun refused to accept the
donation of a New Your City building because municipal codes required
installation of an elevator. Hitchens implies that by refusing to install
the elevator - or even to let the City install it at municipal expense -
Mother Teresa behaved mean-spiritedly toward the handicapped.
Hitchens' first-world interpretation fits the facts well. However,
from Mother Teresa's vantage, any "inconvenience to the handicapped" paled
in comparison to the waste of a hundred thousand dollars that could have
been spent on bread.
The nitty-gritty exigencies of Calcutta distill to this stark
choice: either the destitute and dying are sheltered, cleansed and fed,
or, they die on the streets.
Before we harden in poses of self-satisfied outrage, I would ask
if occasional oversight of treatable diseases at Mother Teresa's "triage
stations" isn't of less moral weight than the routine practice of
high-tech "medicide" in the northern latitudes? "Medicide" is the ghoulish
compulsion to protract "life" at any cost. Patients subjected to medicide
are so tormented by associated procedures that traditional peoples view
their treatment as torture.
What ideological arabesques impel us to lambaste Mother Teresa's
version of "deathwatch" when Westerners construe death as a demon to be
vanquished, even at the expense of reducing life to mere metabolism and
artificially prolonged misery?
Tibetan Buddhist "rinpoches" - in union with Christian monks and
Hindu sanyassin - observe that fear-of-death is intimately linked to human
aggression. No sooner does Mother Teresa create a "Home for the Dying" --
a place in which death is not feared -- than Western analysts beat the
drums of witch-hunt. A curious coincidence indeed...
Catholic moral teaching holds that there is no need to take any
extraordinary measure to prolong life. This seemingly cavalier attitude
may shock some, but what is the alternative? --- a consuming fear that
Life has "made" a horrible mistake, and that we mortals must repress death
at any cost?
However, I am not without misgiving.
I wish Mother Teresa had launched jeremiads against the wealthy. I
wish her Nobel acceptance speech were laced with incendiary condemnation
of the mighty. Having said that, it is also true that Mother Teresa
inhabited the choking miasma of irremediable poverty --- not a propitious
circumstance to strategize "draining the swamp."
I am also appalled by Mother Teresa's indiscriminate acceptance of
money from thugs. However, if unable to provide for the basic needs of my
loved ones, I too would accept charity from Papa Doc.
In the end, Mark Cook's savage treatment of Mother Teresa recalls
a recent comment by investigative reporter Seymour Hersh: "Let me tell you
about our profession. We are the meanest, nastiest bunch of jealous, petty
people who ever lived. You think I wouldn't sell my mother for My Lai?"
Like all of us, Mother Teresa was a flawed individual. She also
dedicated her life to an extraordinarily difficult rescue mission, a
mission so fraught with frustration, desperation, futility and burn-out
that the world ignored this weeping wound for millennia.
To create the impression that Mother Teresa murdered people with
malice aforethought is, to say the least, self-serving.
Attentively,
Alan Archibald